Creating a representative archive of performance practice at the National Theatre of Great Britain

Abstract

In my experience as an in-house archivist for the National Theatre (NT) of Great Britain, I have discovered that what the NT Archive staff have historically considered ‘representative’ of a performance in their collecting is not enough to satisfy all the research needs of its audiences. This article looks to theatre and performance studies with its discussions of historical fragments and archival science through an active archivist model to develop a new approach to archiving performance and creating a more representative archive of performance at the NT. Many principles of archival science are challenged by the practicalities and nuances of being based in a live, working theatre but drawing on the ‘questioning paradigm’ (Ridener in From polders to postmodernism: a concise history of archival theory, Library Juice Press, California, p 101, 2009), this article will consider what shift can occur within archival science to allow archivists more flexibility in their collecting and cataloguing practices to create a new model of archiving, which will create a more representative archive of performance.